How to Maintain PMI Certifications with Free Webinar PDUs and Ensure PDUs Are Reported Correctly
To kickstart your path towards becoming a qualified project manager, you should first register an account at www.pmi.org. PMI (Project Management Institute) is a not-for-profit professional membership association for the project management profession. This means PMI is in charge of certifying new project managers and keeping records of existing ones. The association is also in charge of updating the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) which is the set of standard terminologies and guidelines for project managers, as well as the various project management certifications.
For aspiring project managers, you need to fulfill the requirements of holding at least a secondary degree and completing 23 hours of project management education to take the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) certification. For those with more hands-on project management experience, you can opt to take the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, which has slightly more stringent requirements on education and experience. From there, you can move on to higher tiers of the certification ladder to showcase your skills in project management.
Once you have earned your project management certification with PMI, you would then get acquainted with another term called PDUs (short for Professional Development
Units) which is required as part of maintaining and renewing your Project Management
credentials.
PDUs are one-hour blocks of time doing something "project management", by
learning, teaching, or volunteering. Different certification requires different PDUs. For example, if you are PMP-certified, then you need to earn 60 hours of
PDU over 3 years. More on what are PDUs
here and ways to earn them
here.
You probably would have also realized that your PMI membership
automatically gives you
free access
to ProjectManagement.com which has lots of on-demand webinars that you can
use to earn your PDUs. If not, now you know :)
Both PMI.org and ProjectManagement.com use the same credentials, so you do
not need to register another account when using the latter. This post is
just to highlight a couple of important things to take note of, or issues you may run into when using
ProjectManagement.com.
First and foremost is ProjectManagement.com advises viewers to complete
the webinar from start to finish to have the view counted for PDU.
In my own experience, the system will detect if your active window is not on
the webinar, i.e. no browsing using another tab or running another
application while letting the video run in the background. Each webinar is
about an hour-long, so I would suggest just setting aside an hour block at a
time to finish the entire video.
Once you are done with the video, the PDU will be reported automatically by
the system to PMI. ProjectManagement.com advises that processing will take
about 48-72 hours. You should also receive email notifications when they are
processed and completed. In my experience, for various reasons, sometimes
the system will not detect the view and hence it does not get reported. Because there are no
obvious immediate indications, you will not know if the view has been
counted.
So what I usually do is once I finish a webinar, go to the top right corner which will have my name and a drop-down list. Click on
the drop-down and the first item should be "Account". Hover over it, right-click and choose to open in a new tab. This is important because you do not
want to browse away from the page that you just finished the webinar.
In the new tab, you will be on the "My Account" page. Expand on the section with
"PDUS AWARDED" and you should be able to see the title of the webinar you
just finished listed there. Once you see it here, you can rest assured
that the system has detected the view properly. Webinars viewed previously and PDUs awarded successfully will have
"Processed" status. If you did not complete the webinar or browsed away
during the video, you will probably see X% completed. For such cases, it is
difficult to determine where exactly should you continue off from, so I
would suggest that you either launch the webinar one more time or just go
for another one.
If you do not see the webinar title listed, ensure that you are still login
to the website. Login again if you are not and reload the My Account page to
see if the view has been updated. If you still do not see it, one last
option would be to go back to the webinar tab that you left off above and
do a reload on that page. Hopefully, the system will recognize the
view.
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